Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now.
On today's episode let's look at how to color calibrate your Mac's display.
So why would you want to color calibrate your display?
In the past you would do that if you were a graphic designer especially if you worked
with print you would want to make sure the colors on the screen closely matched the colors
that would come up when you print something or have something published.
But today just about anybody would want to do this.
Just to see the colors better on internet shopping sites for instance, for photos when
you are working with photos in iPhoto you want to make sure that the color you are seeing
on the screen really represents the real colors in the image.
So doing it is pretty simple.
Just go to System Preferences and then Displays and then it will bring up the window here
for Displays.
You have various different tabs here.
You go to Color and then you have the Calibrate button.
I've got two monitors attached to my Mac so I get two windows here and I'll get a little
screen like that.
But when you click the Calibrate button you should jump right to this Calibrator Assistant.
So the Calibrate Assistant is just basically a step-by-step going through various screens
and making adjustments.
You can do two modes; the normal mode or you can check off Expert Mode here which will
add some extra steps there.
People usually stick to the normal mode but you can investigate both.
The first step here, the setup, asks you to adjust the controls on your screen.
Now if you have an iMac or a MacBook the screen is built into your Mac and you don't have
to worry about these because there are no external controls.
It is all done on your keyboard here.
So you are going to want to use either the F1 or F2 keys or you may have to hold down
the fn key and use F1 or F2 to adjust the brightness and contrast on your screen so
that this image here appears as it should.
So read through all this carefully and get that going before you continue to the next
step.
Now you get to the native gamma step here and it is about luminance and you can do control
right here to basically adjust the image as you see it on the screen.
We're not actually going to see it here because we're doing a screen capture, I'm capturing
digitally the image, but what I'm seeing on the screen when I adjust that is this does
change quite a bit, the entire screen does, and I try to get this image to match the description.
Most of the rest of the steps are like that.
I'm going to go to target gamma here.
You are going to select one of these two based on what you read.
You're going to continue through these steps here and then you can give this profile a
name.
You can actually save different profiles here and switch between them.
For instance, you can have your default profile.
You can have a profile you think works best for editing photos.
You can have a profile maybe that works best for your favorite shopping site to get the
colors right.
But for most people you are just going to calibrate it once and save the calibrated
profile like that and then when you are finished hit Done.
Your screen now should show colors more accurately if you've made good choices.
So now you can see here, for this display, I've got the original setting here and I've
got this other one.
I've done some other experiments as well so I've got a few things here.
But this is where they will be added so instead of going to calibrate you can simply click
on one and it will switch between them.
It is kind of impossible to get everything just perfect.
I mean you are comparing pixels on a laminated screen to a real world objects like products
you may buy or printouts.
Then of course if you are doing printouts there is usually a color calibration for the
printer you are using and how that works depends on the software tools that come with your
printer and how your printer works is different for just about every brand.
But if you are concerned about color calibrating your screen to a printout your are going to
have to do both.
You are going to have to do the screen calibration and then you are going to have to do your
printer calibration and there may be something on your printer that needs adjustment from
time to time especially when you replace the ink.
So I hope you found this useful.
Until next time this is Gary
with MacMost Now.